


so long so quiet

by winterjan



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 12:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17939828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterjan/pseuds/winterjan
Summary: “You shouldn’t say things like that,” Eliot said. He was frowning, but it was soft one, like a single cloud marring a perfect blue sky.“Why not?”Eliot smiled. “Because one day, I might actually believe you.”





	so long so quiet

 

1.

 

“I love you.”

They were lying out on the tiles, underneath the stars, picking out unfamiliar constellations. Beside him, Quentin could feel Eliot’s warmth, his magic, as he rolled over to face him.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Eliot said. He was frowning, but it was soft one, like a single cloud marring a perfect blue sky.

“Why not?”

Eliot smiled. “Because one day, I might actually believe you.”

The past three years, they’d spent their days brute-forcing their way through this endless puzzle, and their nights falling into each other’s arms. Quentin couldn’t imagine doing this with anyone else, or wanting to, even if there was no finish line in sight. He’d spent months upon months finding every way there was to make Eliot smile, or laugh, or sigh that fond, exasperated sigh of his, cataloguing them all, pulling him out of moments of hopelessness and despair and letting Eliot do the same for him. And after all that, Eliot didn’t believe him.

He wanted to grab Eliot by the shoulders, kiss him, love him, _make_  him believe.

In the absence of courage, he didn’t. He never said it again, either. Eliot didn’t seem to notice.

 

 

2.

 

Eliot left first, because he was the High King and he had a kingdom to run and he couldn’t just sit around eating fruit when Margo needed him but-

Quentin, mind all full of embarrassment and shame, wished he could keep Eliot to himself, just for five more minutes. Five minutes, and fifty years. That would be enough.

It was fine. Eliot didn’t want him. It was fine. Quentin knew he was right. The last time he and Eliot had been like _that_ , it was after they were overloaded with feeling from the bottled emotions; this was the same, probably. Fifty years of inherited love that didn’t belong to him, not really. All those unspoken _I love yous_  that version of him had never got around to saying. It was him and it wasn’t him, and it was fine.

And anyway, he had Alice. Sometimes. When they weren’t at each other’s throats, when they could stand to be in the same room. Up until ten minutes ago, he’d thought that Alice would be the love of his life. Bottled emotions really shouldn’t change that.

Except that they did. Except that when he ate dinner that night, all he could think of was all the meals he’d eaten with Eliot, those evenings out on the tiles, meals traded for magic tricks at the market. Except that when he looked at Eliot, all he could see was those hundreds of thousands of smiles he’d spent a lifetime collecting. Except that when he slept, his dreams were full of the taste of sweetest fruit.

 

 

3.

 

It didn’t fade, only got stronger. Every time he looked at Eliot, every time Eliot’s hand brushed his shoulder, every time he laughed or frowned or groaned in frustration. Quentin tried to squash it down, bury it deeper, think _Alice Alice Alice_  even as she grew more and more distant and secretive. It never worked, of course. Every time he thought he had it under control, Eliot would meet his eye again and everything would come rushing up to the surface.

 _It’s obsession_ , he told himself. _Fifty years of memories of one person will do that. It’s not love. It can’t be._

“He doesn’t want your love,” his shadow said, as he stood tied to the Muntjac’s mast.

Quentin closed his eyes, screwed them shut, as if that would give him silence. “It’s not love.”

“Of course it’s love,” the shadow said. “He just doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want you. He never did. Not in five decades did he ever once say it back to you. You were merely the only available option.”

He wanted to say _no, no, it’s not true_ , but it was.

“He won’t ever love you back.”

He wanted to say _yes, yes, Eliot would_ , but he wouldn’t.

Maybe the memories of peaches and plums had been the spark, the animus that made him realise, but he’d loved Eliot for a long time. All those moments he’d coveted, those years at the mosaic, were the same ones he’d been collecting since his first day at Brakebills. Eliot’s smiles, his laughs, his quiet moments, his flurries of panic over meaningless things. Quentin had loved him, even back then. Not as strongly, but it had still been there, thrumming through his chest.

It was love. It was. And it wouldn’t be returned.

He had to give it to his shadow: intrusive thoughts had never made him want to literally throw himself off the side of a ship before. He already felt like he was drowning.

 

 

4.

 

Eliot ate a yoghurt, across the table from him. They were in the Cottage, in brief respite for the first time in a while. They both had a lot going on.

He rolled it around in his mind, like a ball bearing in a marble run. _I love you. I love you._  It slotted into place, comfortably, alongside all the other things he knew about his friends.

“The yoghurt isn’t as good, in Fillory,” Eliot said. “I don’t miss a lot about Earth, but I miss yoghurt.”

“And wine?” Quentin ventured.

“Mm,” Eliot hummed around his spoon, but it was noncommittal. He hadn’t been drinking as much, lately. Or, at least, not where Quentin had been able to see it. It was the promise of magic, probably. They were so close Quentin could taste it.

Then, Eliot said, “Do you think you’ll come back?”

Quentin blinked. “Come back?”

“To Fillory.”

The answer was no, and yes. Fillory was and remained everything Quentin had always dreamt about, but it was also majorly fucked up in ways that even a ruler like Eliot couldn’t fix, ways that made him never want to go back. But, but, but, Eliot was there.

He always ran into that _but_.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Eliot smiled, just a small one. “Life was a lot simpler when we were just rearranging mosaic tiles, huh?”

That was the Fillory that Quentin wanted to go back to. Lying on a blanket under the stars.

Eliot ate his yoghurt. Quentin rolled the idea around in his mind.

_I love you, I love you, I love you._

 

 

5.

 

Everything, predictably, went to shit.

Eliot shot the monster and, even as Quentin realised how fucked that made them, it still drummed at the back of his mind: _I love you._

 

 

6.

 

Perhaps more predictably, things got worse. Eliot wasn’t Eliot and Quentin was _Brian_ and by the time he was himself again there was so much blood staining the both of them there was little chance of either of them getting clean.

“Maybe,” he said, in Greece, where the light was all golden and gorgeous, and it was warm, and it felt like that distant September when he first arrived at Brakebills, if only the man beside him was his friend and not just a creature wearing his face, “Could I maybe have Eliot back?”

Once again, years of memory and years of _feeling_ had rushed back into Quentin’s mind, dazzling and swimming behind his eyes. The sensation, somehow, was familiar - and how fucked up was that? That he’d been robbed of himself so many times that the flavour of regaining it was etched into him like scratches in stone.

“The one who tried to kill me?” the monster said, with Eliot’s face and voice and eyes but none of _Eliot_. Quentin tried to see behind it all, to see if Eliot was back there, rattling at the railings of the body that was now a cage, but there was nothing.

It really, really wasn’t fair that the only two people he’d ever loved had both been ripped from themselves and replaced by something harsh and cruel and inhuman. First Alice, now Eliot. Quentin was beginning to think he was cursed.

 

 

7.

 

“I don’t want to kill him,” he told Julia.

Julia’s lips twisted, and she frowned. “He’s already dead.”

“I know,” he said. “Still.”

In a couple of days, the monster would be back in Blackspire, Eliot’s body with it.

He still hadn’t got over the shock, he didn’t think. He wouldn’t for a while. Maybe once the monster was gone, he could grieve. For Eliot. Christ, for his dad. Everything was so, so fucked up.

“We could get him back,” Julia said. “Like we got Alice.”

Quentin shook his head. It didn’t work like that. Even if Julia still had her powers, it wouldn’t work like that.

Then, the monster appeared in the kitchen with them, and Quentin thought _I love you, I love you, I love you_ , just on the off chance Eliot’s soul could hear it.

 


End file.
